Felix Salmon

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S&P brought its hammer down on Europe today, with nine — count ‘em — downgrades of euro zone countries. The removal of France’s triple-A has been getting most of the headlines, but for me the bigger news is the fact that Portugal has now been downgraded to junk status.

As my posts have been getting longer of late, I’ve ended up with a vast number of items that I meant to write but, well, haven’t. Since I’m not going to get to all of them, I’ll do some quick hits here.

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I suspect we’re still only in its early days, but there’s no doubt that we’re in a massive Chinese-art bubble right now. And for proof, all you need to do is look at the league table of the highest-grossing artists of 2011.

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Dan Freed has an amazing story today about credit-card interchange fees — the ones that weren’t touched at all by the Durbin amendment in the Dodd-Frank bill. But it turns out that the courts might yet prove even tougher than Congress: various suits working their way through the legal system could end up costing the banks hundreds of billions of dollars in settlement costs — plus a reduction of interchange fees to something approaching international norms.

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As Mitt Romney cruises to his inevitable coronation as the Republican presidential candidate, increasing amounts of attention are being focused on his history at Bain Capital, where he made his fortune. Did he create 100,000 jobs, as he claims? Or is he a vulture and asset stripper?

Many thanks to Yoree Koh (and @Dutch_Book) for bringing Ben Stein’s lawsuit against Kyocera to my attention. You can download the whole thing here, but it’s worth spelling out some of the more hilarious parts.